Meta Quest 3 APK with UE 5.5.3 triples drawcalls when not up close to meshes, compared to UE 5.4.4

Development Platform & Builds XR Development
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Hi!

I’m in the process of migrating a VR project (based on the VRTemplate) from UE 5.4.4 to UE 5.5.3, and am struggling with a significant performance degradation when deployed on Meta Quest 3.

To narrow it down, I’ve created a simple test level from the VRTemplate level, basically removing everything except the walls and floors. Here I’ve added 100 Grabbable_SmallCubes, disabled physics on them, and checked the results on both a UE 5.4.4 APK and UE 5.5.3 APK deployed to a Meta Quest 3.

  • On the UE 5.4.4 version, it takes a consistent 110-111 drawcalls to render the scene, no matter if you’re far away from the cubes, or up close - this works fine
  • On the UE 5.5.3 version, it takes 308 drawcalls to render the scene when you’re not up close to the cubes, and 108 drawcalls when you’re up close (less than 1m I guess) - this is problematic

This video demonstrates the observations with the OVR-overlay and ‘stat unit’ activated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKCxobqs0mY

I’ve tried adjusting many project/world/mesh settings, added the Meta Unreal Engine 5 Integration 72.0.1, but nothing seems to prevent this strange behavior.

I’m wondering if anyone has observed similar behavior, and more importantly, knows the cause/reason of this, and how to fix/prevent it.

I’d be happy to share any project settings/details/… if it helps.

Thank you!

Cheers,
Thijs

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I cannot edit the original post, so here is an additional note:

This behavior is identical for a vanilla VRTemplate project in UE 5.5.3 (create a new VRTemplate project, adjust the level to remove everything except floor/walls, add the 100 cubes, add stat-unit-console-command to VRPawn Event BeginPlay, create APK and deploy to Quest3).

Also including the video embedded instead of just a link: